Miriam Plavin-Masterman
Co-Host, What If Instead? Podcast
Miriam Plavin-Masterman is an Associate Professor of Business Administration at Worcester State University, where she teaches Management courses, focusing on organizational culture and innovation. She holds an MA and PhD in Sociology from Brown University, an MBA from Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, and a BSc from Cornell University. In addition to her work on climate change and innovation, she studies how social entrepreneurs repurpose abandoned industrial spaces into public green spaces to make cities more livable. A New York native, she lives just outside of Boston with her family.
About The What If Instead? Podcast
A podcast co-hosted by Miriam Plavin-Masterman and Alejandro Juárez Crawford
A show about everyday people reimagining the way things work—and tackling the obstacles they face.
We explore adventures in democratizing innovation—how the chance to try one’s hand at something new affects people and even organizations, what “powers” they discover and what challenges they face along the way.
We dig into access: what determines who gets the chance to try and disrupt the way things work? We examine obstacles in specific industries and communities, and go deep with people working to break through them.
We look closely at the role of tech—how it can equip or disempower people to build experiments of their own—and society: what leads us to accept a role as consumers of the way things work, and what it means to discover our powers to ask in practice, “What if instead?”
Producer of the What If Instead? Podcast: Sirjan Banik
About the Producer
Sirjan Banik, producer, is founder and coordinator of the Social Impact Lab at BRAC University, which provides access to real-world experience creating impact and meeting urgent needs. His work focuses on building social entrepreneurship pathways for students, structuring social innovation frameworks in higher education, and stimulating dialogue, engagement, and critical thinking. Traditional tools have too often failed to fulfill their potential to democratize access. That's why a computer science and engineering graduate like him focuses on global collaboration and social entrepreneurship. Srijan has been a Millennium Fellow at the Millennium Campus Network and UNAI and a Global Fellow at the Open Society University Network.
